


History Will Wait For Us To Make It

by EllaStorm



Category: SHAKESPEARE William - Works, Will (TV 2017)
Genre: Discussions of Existentialist and Absurdist Philosophy, Fix-It of Sorts, Good Is Not Soft, Hurt/Comfort, Kit Has A Heart Of Gold, Kit Is Also A Badass, M/M, Violence, Will Is Just A Little Broken, it gets better though, slight whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:54:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21923977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllaStorm/pseuds/EllaStorm
Summary: Will could have seen the violence coming. Robert Greene is a coward, after all, and there’s hardly anything cowards like doing more than kicking a man who is already down. Help arrives from an unexpected party; but it turns out that there’s more than just Will’s broken bones that need fixing…
Relationships: Christopher Marlowe/William Shakespeare, past William Shakespeare/Alice Burbage
Comments: 2
Kudos: 33





	History Will Wait For Us To Make It

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SandraMorningstar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SandraMorningstar/gifts).



> This is a Christmas gift to my brilliant, brilliant friend @SandraMorningstar.
> 
> Since we both fell deep into the MustAdoreChristopherMarloweUntilOurVeryLastBreath-hole a while ago, this year’s prompt was only consequential: Will/Kit Angsty Hurt/Comfort…with a touch of Whump.
> 
> Even though I must admit that this story turned out a lot more positive on the page than it had originally constructed itself in my head (that pesky Christmas spirit must have gotten to me somewhere down the line…), I do hope I still managed to fill your prompt in a way you like <3
> 
> A most wonderful Christmas to you :*
> 
> PS: There is a lot of rambling about philosophical concepts going on in this one, especially towards the end; but it’s really all Kit Marlowe’s fault. (And maybe Joss Whedon’s, too. A little bit.)

In retrospect, it had only been a matter of time.

Hounds could smell blood, pain and fear. All the signs of a wounded animal. They knew to wait for their time to bite, to demand compensation for the day they had been bitten themselves; and when the time came, _they_ came. Angry beasts in the bodies of men.

So when Will made his way from the theatre towards his lodgings (that truly didn’t deserve the name) about one month after the _Richard III_ premiere and three men peeled out of the shadows of the buildings to his sides, surrounding him in a matter of seconds, he was surprised how much he hadn’t seen it coming.

“Greene,” he greeted the only one he recognised, and he knew it in his gut, right then, that this was _bad._ An archaic instinct demanded him to flee, or attack, or do _anything_ , but he subdued it. He _couldn’t_ do anything. Not in this part of London. Not at this hour. Not with his lacking skills in fight or flight.

So, he tried the only weapon he knew he possessed.

“What do you want from me?”

He didn’t get to speak further, harshly interrupted by a kick to the back of his knees, a punch to the side of his ribcage. Pain bloomed through his body and exited his throat in a mangled groan; and his instincts attempted desperately to protect him, made him throw up his arms as he hit the ground, made him curl in on himself, but the kicks and punches followed in quick succession, intercut the eerie silence of the late night with brutal sounds as his legs and torso were being hit again and again, forcing more agony from his mouth.

The beating stopped, as sudden as it had started; the kicking, punching limbs, the sounds of anger and bloodthirst frozen and dispelled.

Someone was breathing hotly down Will’s neck.

“Hush, little poet. You won’t win this fight with words. And I’ll make sure you won’t write any more of them down for a long, long time,” Greene’s slick, university-refined accent dripped into Will’s ear like poison. Every bone in his body hurt, to the point of him not being able to tell where the pain started and where it stopped; and Will let himself drift towards the blessed darkness that was lingering at the edges of his consciousness – until he was ripped back into reality by someone violently gripping his yet-untouched right hand and pushing it to the ground, beneath something that felt like the heel of a shoe.

Dread climbed out of Will’s stomach, up into his throat.

“No,” he managed.

“I love to hear you beg. Do it some more, little bird. See if it hel-“

His sentence was cut off, left hanging in the air, a dropped thread.

Then the heel pressing down on Will’s hand was lifted. And a voice was raised, familiar through the haze in Will’s mind.

“Step away now or I will put you out of your misery, Greene.” The words were sharp and cold and completely frightening; ice and steel in the dark.

“Big words for a cocksucker, Marlowe,” Greene retorted, and though Will couldn’t see him from his position on the ground, being as little in his senses as he was, he could still hear a new emotion dulling his sneer: Terror.

Only then did the name Greene had spoken truly register with Will.

_Marlowe._

Kit was here.

“I would choose my vocabulary more carefully, were I the man with a dagger at his throat. Just an advice between colleagues,” Kit said calmly, his voice not only vaguely familiar now, but clearly recognisable.

“Are you going to make it look like an accident then?” More fear in Greene’s words, and something in Will’s battered torso sprang back to life; an emotion other than pain.

“No need to. One of the perks of my profession. Somebody else will figure something out.”

“Profession?” Greene’s voice broke on the last syllable, and Kit gave a mirthless laugh that would have sent a chill through Will’s every bone, had he not been so elated by the man’s presence.

“There are many things you do not know, Greene, and you should be glad about not knowing. Now get out of my sight, or I will make sure it takes a week until your blood is washed off this street. It’ll take long enough for that of your men to disappear as is.”

A gasp, Greene’s, followed by Kit’s joyless laughter, and then running steps, away from Will, fading out into the London darkness.

A warm hand at Will’s face, his neck.

Then, nothing.

***

It was dark, when Will woke up, but it wasn’t the kind of pressing, heavy darkness he had lost his consciousness to. Memory came back to him in pieces, and he swallowed against the dryness in his throat, opening his eyes with some difficulty. He couldn’t tell exactly where he was – in a room, it seemed, immersed in incomplete blackness, as if a sliver of light was drifting in from somewhere indeterminable, and on a bed, maybe, under some blankets. Will tried moving his arms, then his legs, and it worked, to his relief; even though his body protested against the movement, rewarding him with a harsh stab of pain every time he stretched or bent a limb too far. A vindictive, small voice at the back of his head reminded him of the fact that he _deserved_ this for what had happened to Alice. She would never have been pushed in Southwell’s way, if not for him; and she had probably gone through way worse at Topcliffe’s mercy than he had at Greene’s .

Some part of him wished that Greene had broken his hand after all.

He moved the extremity in question up to his cheek and touched a stretch of skin under his eye that throbbed more painfully than the rest of him. To his surprise he found four neat stitches there; and upon further inspection of his body, he realised that someone had bandaged his wounds with fresh linen and something that smelled like herbal paste.

“Hello.” It came out crooked and only half-recognisable, but upon saying it, something across from Will moved, rustled for a few moments; and then a wave of warm light poured into the room.

“You’re awake.” Kit was standing next to a heavy, floor-length curtain that separated the room Will had been sleeping in from the rest of the storey. Behind Kit, Will could see a big wooden table, covered in inkwells, sheets of paper and what looked suspiciously like human skulls, all lit by economically placed candles; and at the back of the room a stairwell leading to a lower floor. It was only then that he realised that Kit had brought him to his house. To his _bedroom_ to be more precise. And that it had been _Kit_ who must have had somebody take care of his wounds, as well.

“What…what am I doing here?” Will demanded, more to the point than he had meant to, and Kit sighed, grabbed the candle closest to him and carried it over to where Will was lying in what was most likely Kit’s very own bed.

Will sat up, adamantly clenching his jaw through the pain; and with the movement the blankets slipped off his shoulders, forcing him to notice that he wasn’t exactly wearing clothes. It didn’t bother him as much as it would have otherwise – he had almost been battered to death quite recently, after all. Beggars, not choosers.

Kit put the candle down on a tiny side table next to the bed, and sat down on the mattress, deliberately levelling with Will. He looked tired, worn, and his eyes had none of the usual challenge, nor the ever-looming threat of dishonesty in them. It had all been supplanted by a strange kind of serenity, intercut by subtle warmth. And Will, to his surprise, felt himself relax in his presence.

“Greene attacked you on Park Street,” Kit began. “The reason for which seems to be that you, as far as I’ve heard, quite spectacularly beat him in a battle of wits a few months ago, and he swore revenge. You weren’t conscious when I found you; so, I brought you here and got your wounds dressed. You have been asleep for almost twenty hours.”

Will surveyed him.

“You killed those two men, didn’t you?”

There was a long pause, during which Kit’s eyes seemed to pierce themselves through Will’s skull, right into his brain.

“I was outnumbered,” he gave back, finally.

Will nodded.

“Thank you,” he said.

“No need,” Kit brushed it off with a swivel of his elegant hand, like he hadn’t risked his life, like he hadn’t _taken_ two lives last night for Will to be sitting here right now.

Will thought of Baxter, suddenly, and the vicious little voice in his head demanded attention once more:

_He must be getting used to trading other men’s lives for yours by now._

“I didn’t deserve to be saved,” he said, before he could consider it further. “I’m not worth that much.”

A small frown crinkled Kit’s forehead, but Will kept speaking, a flood of long-overdue words, dragged out of him by force.

“I’m just…I just wanted to _do_ something here in London. With my life. I’m a playwright; it might be the only thing I am genuinely good at, the _one_ talent God gave me, and I have been taught that it is a sin to waste what we are given. But ever since I’ve set foot in this city, ever since I’ve laid eyes on the theatre, people have been getting hurt, Kit, _good_ people. Baxter. Alice. Their families. My _wife._ And it’s just because…if I had never come to London, if I had just relented from my selfish desires and stayed in my place, they would all be _fine_ now. Nobody would have died. Nobody would have been hurt. Nobody would have suffered. And I am grateful to be alive, but there is so much guilt in me because of it, that I must believe that maybe you had better left me there to die and rot yesterday, and-“

“Your death wouldn’t have changed anything,” Kit interrupted him. “It would have meant nothing.”

“It would have meant penance.”

“It would have meant nothing,” Kit repeated, harshly. His voice turned softer, after that, softer than Will had ever heard it, and his hands were on Will’s shoulders; warm, insistent. “Existence is a maddening thing, William. It’s far easier not to exist, because that doesn’t cause any damage. But once you’ve made it, elbowed your way into the world kicking and screaming, it means something. Believe me, I’ve tried very hard to ignore that fact for most of my life. And I’ve only been disabused of the notion when I came out of my latest writing stupor, stared down at my work and finally had an inkling that there was some sense to all of this.”

Will swallowed. “That’s what faith feels like, Kit. Now you know it.”

“Hardly,” Kit said, but there was a small, confused thread running through his voice, like he couldn’t quite believe what he was saying right now, that something so life-affirming happened to just be pouring out of _his_ mouth, of all people’s. “I was trying to put something else into words, however, and I want you to listen to it, because I think it might be a quite profound observation. The human existence – however incidental – affords us something rather indomitable: A choice. And whatever choices we make, there are always good consequences – and terrible ones. But as long as we _choose_ …we’re _living._ If we just drag ourselves through our seemingly predefined existences, if we never make a conscious _choice_ , no matter how wrong that choice might go, we’re already dead to begin with. And just because there have been consequences of the most terrible kind, that doesn’t mean we’re allowed to stop making choices, that we have the permission to just let the inevitable happen, whatever you Catholics might believe that is. You have got to keep _choosing_ , William. Your own path. Your own life. And for God’s sake, do _not_ stop writing plays, because you are _brilliant_. You could change the _world. We_ could. Do you even know how precious that is?”

Will had completely lost himself in the momentum of Kit’s words, and only realised that Kit had finished when he was staring breathless and wild into Will’s eyes, his hands pressing into Will’s shoulders like they meant to entrench his words there, like he wanted him to feel what he was feeling – and oh, Will _did._

 _Hope_ wasn’t something he had ever associated with Kit, but his heart was flung wide open, defenceless against it settling there, fluttering and yellow-bright like a bird. He was crying, he noticed, and Kit’s finger was there in an instant, at the corner of his eye, wiping a drop of wetness away, stroking over the stitches on his cheek; and they were both laughing, because suddenly it all seemed so easy, so clear, like the future had opened before them, brought to life by Kit’s passionate words, thousands upon thousands of possibilities; and how could Will have forgotten what that _felt_ like?

He remembered now, remembered all too well, why he hadn’t been able to stay in Stratford, why he was meant to be here, _here_ , in the middle of all this…and before Will could stop himself, amidst the laughter and the pain it caused, he had bridged the gap between the both of them and kissed Kit on the mouth.

The kiss was reciprocated, like it had been expected, like it had been invited, like they had never done anything but kiss each other; and Will’s head was as light as his heart when he let go of Kit, looking at him.

Curious.

The blue in Kit’s eyes was deeper than ever, his smile honest, his hands anchors on Will’s skin. They were just looking at each other for a long while, before Kit finally broke the silence.

“So, what are you saying, William? Shall we make some history together?”


End file.
